A Serious Case of Amnesia: the Dutch and their Middle Ages

Abstract

When in 1872 the Dutch government finally decided to build a national museum in the capital, Amsterdam, it chose among the many candidates for the job the Roman Catholic architect Pierre Cuypers to make a plan. If Cuypers had presented a neoclassicist design with a noble Corinthian facade and an entrance hall, lined with statues of Dutch heroes dressed up as Greek philosophers or Roman senators, the arbiters of taste would probably have moaned a little that it was a worn-out concept, but no one would have raised any serious objection. But what Cuypers came up with was a neo-Gothic extravaganza of enormous proportions, to celebrate the glorious past of the fatherland. From the very beginning his plans elicited massive controversy, best summed up in the words of King William III, who, when he saw the plans, pronounced his firm intention, expressing himself in the language of monarchs rather than that of the people: ‘Je ne mettrai jamais le pied dans ce monastère.’ For once the king represented the true feelings of a large part of his subjects, to whom the construction of the Rijksmuseum was yet another step in the papist plot to suppress freedom and true religion in the Netherlands.¹